September 27, 2005

ew.

Either this antidepressant is not working, or school really sucks.

Considering that my personality is still different from before the drug, and that my blood pressure has gone from slightly too high to low enough to make me dizzy [which usually happens with me and SSRI's], I'm gonna go with school sucks.

I'm really not comfortable with the idea of working full-time [plus overtime, spank you very much] while paying somebody money to take up another 15 hours of my life every week so I can eventually...uh, work someplace else, maybe. I'm no sucker, I can read a classified section. I don't give a shit what Monster.com says. There's no fucking jobs out there unless you're a nurse or a trucker. Shit, if there WERE any jobs, I could be making nearly twice what I am now at the same job I'm already doing without additional schooling. I can see why what I'm doing is completely retarded and pointless, and everybody else thinks it's just the greatest thing, that I'm finally doing something with my life. No I'm not, you goddamn dimbulbs. I'm just spending upwards of $15K so I can look like I'm doing something and keep you nagging cunts off my ass. I know the government's never gonna hire me with a damn associate's degree. I have never seen a job anywhere in human services where they asked for anything less than a bachelor's. I'm just wasting my money and running myself into the ground.

If my counselor could read this, she'd surely find about fifteen irrational thoughts in it. The one she can't counter, though, is that I can't get the job I want with the degree I'm working for. Nobody anywhere wants somebody with an associates' degree.

Prepare for College-Induced Nervous Breakdown 2.0.

And I can't believe nobody wrote to me about the Iraq thing. Come on, there has to be somebody out there who disagrees and thinks Bush is doing the right thing and this is all honourable and shit. No? ~shrug~ Suit yourselves. I thought maybe having a new troll to ban from my e-mail would lift my spirits.

oh, who gives a crap anyway?

The Vikes finally win, albeit against a bunch of homeless people. See what happens when you stop playing pocket pool and start playing football, fellas?

***

Q. What do a bowl of Grape Nuts, a green Sharpie and Jesus Christ have in common?

A. Fuck if I know. That's why I gave up trying to write jokes.

***

I watched the LOTR trilogy over the weekend. One of the things that struck me about it was the recurring, I don't know if you'd call it a theme, but the motif of an honourable or glorious death, or at least a death that helped achieve some greater good. You had all these people dying in hopeless battles defending garrisons and charging orcs and whatnot, but they were defending something. They had a chance, if not for an accomplished or illustrious life, then at least for a death that meant something more than just being put in the ground and eaten by worms. If all you had was a crappy mediocre life, you could at least sacrifice it to buy life or freedom or something worthwhile for somebody else. If you couldn't make a satisfactory impact in life, you could at least do it in death. And I'm not just talking about imaginary people fighting orcs--I'm talking about so many of the wars throughout history in which people defended their land against invaders, or left their homes to meet an enemy which was on its way to conquer them, or what have you.

Whereas what we're looking at here--you know what I'm talking about, it starts with an I and it ain't ice cream--where is it? Where's the fucking nobility? Everybody knows the war is retarded. These are good people who signed up to fight and die for their country, but do they deserve to die for something stupid? Is that a good use of a soldier's life? Anybody's life? Anybody's death? Shit, if the day ever came when I wanted to die for something noble, I couldn't do it, because there's nothing noble left to die for. I couldn't even sign up for the army or stow away on a ship or something, because why would I? So I could die for Bush and his stupid fucking personal glory trip? What else is there? What is there to die for in which the dying will actually accomplish something, where your staying put til the end actually made a difference? If this war was actually accomplishing something--if we were fighting another Hitler instead of a bunch of disbanded, disaffected assclowns with stolen munitions--that'd be worthwhile. Do you see that happening? Do you see any of this "defending America's freedom" shit happening? Defending it from what? A rinkydink dictator and his crappy little army that could, basically, stand there in Iraq and shoot in our general direction and not much else? Oooooooooooh. Gobs of honour there. Just scads.

The only honour that I can find in it is in the people who took their oath and have gone there to honour that oath, whether they agree with it or not, because of their sense of duty; and in the people whose sense of duty to humanity is even greater than their sense of duty to their profession, and who defected as a protest against the wrongness of the policy. I know those two things contradict, but in a way maybe they don't; in a way they're sort of mirror images of each other. Military duty and humanitarian duty should go hand in hand; it's the only defensible justification for an army. That's not happening here, and I can just as easily understand somebody feeling a duty not to fight an unjust war as I can understand someone's loyalty to the organization to which they pledged themselves.

What pisses me off is that even if you wanted some honour, there isn't any. The society, or the media, or whoever you want to blame, has done such a thorough job of shitting all over everybody's and everything's good name that nothing's fucking honourable anymore.

Now I'm going to sit back and wait for the angry e-mails from Iraq veterans who are doubtless going to tell me that I don't know dick shit about honour and duty and blah blah blah. Well, maybe I don't. Or maybe I just have a different idea about it. And of course, because my idea is different, it's automatically wrong. That's just a given.

***

And I'm very tired, and should have spent this time paying bills and making phone calls instead of babbling incoherently. Not that it matters; there's road excavation going on nearby, and it's difficult to concentrate on anything when your apartment is shaking.

September 18, 2005

Fuck yeah!!!!11!

I have officially turned in the last assignments for this quarter. Stick a fork in it, babe, it's done.

In unconscious news, I had a weird dream about a celebrity event held in a basement with multi-doored bathrooms. Weird Al was there, and he wanted either a button or a bra from everybody. I didn't have any buttons, so I gave him one of several bras I had with me.

I'm gonna go make popcorn and watch a movie now. Maybe two. I might see Spider-Man 2, since I watched 1 the other day. [I think that scene where he's kissing Kirsten Dunst upside down in full costume with just his mouth exposed might've pushed my kinky button. That would explain the dreams I've been having...] Maybe I'll watch a LOTR movie and get all steamed up from all that chain mail and Elijah Wood and stuff.

same bitch time, same bitch channel...

Lyric for the day:figure it out, she
she's a good-time fella
she got a little fund to fight for moneypenny's rights
figure it out, she
she's a good-time fella
too bad the burial was premature she said
and smiled
--Tori, "Mr. Zebra"

September 17, 2005

Why I Want Breast Cancer

Because one of two things will happen:

a] I'll die, which is going to happen eventually anyway; or

b] I'll get a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery that's covered by my insurance so I don't have to pay thousands of dollars for an "elective" breast reduction. In other words, THEY CAN FINALLY CHOP THESE HORRIBLE FUCKING THINGS OFF AND REPLACE THEM WITH TITS THAT WILL FIT IN A NORMAL BRA THAT DID NOT HAVE TO BE CONSTRUCTED IN DRYDOCK.

I'd prefer b], but frankly, either one would be fine at this point. Just so I don't have to spend fifteen minutes a day in vain attempts to stuff them into a DD [the largest cup size that comes in colours other than black, white and beige for less than $35] because the few DDD's I have are either dirty or so uncomfortable that I can't wear them. What's worse, I AM wearing a DDD, and they're starting to ooze out the top of that too. What terrifies me is the idea that they may never stop growing and in another five or ten years they'll be visible from space. My town will start selling T-shirts with "Home of the original Twin Peaks" on them. Brenna knows exactly what I'm talking about. Neither one of us can wear a push-up bra because we'd need a periscope with it, and that gets too expensive.

I could just go spend more money on bras, and I'm gonna have to, but I'd really rather somebody just cut the damn things off. They get in the way when I play guitar anyway. [Wearing a minimizer actually makes it worse--it squashes your tit down, and part of it ends up under your arm, restricting your arm movement even more. Try reaching around a cone and then reaching around a square box and you'll see what I mean.]

September 13, 2005

Holy Shit!

In other news, more proof that it's damn hard to run in heels: the Vikes got the mortal piss pounded out of them by Tampa Bay. Coach Tice remains optimistic, though, since the October Vikings schedule includes games against Girl Scout Troupe 15, Sunnyview Nursing Home, the Iraqi army, and his niece's stuffed animal collection. This, he claims, should allow his team to continue their current strategy of sitting on the field playing tiddleywinks and beating their meat while the other team plays actual football.

This is Frida Peeple, bringing you All The News I Can Stand To Look At Before I've Had My Second Cup Of Coffee™.

September 08, 2005

Not only that...

Boxelder WHAT Days?

In my Internet research for a project, I've come across what may be the most unfortunately named festival ever: Minneota's Boxelder Bug Days.

No, gentle readers, I am not making this up. In the name of Hera, I wish I were. The festival, held in a town with quite possibly the most unoriginal name in the state ["Hey, let's just take out the S! They'll think it's a whole different word!"], involves box elder bug races and something called a "Bug Market."

This, readers, is a box elder bug.* I kill a lot of them at work in the summer.

This image is taken from Eden Advanced Pest Technologies, which describes box elder bugs as pests. They crawl into your house in the fall, breed, and emerge in droves in the spring. Colour me charmed. Sounds like just the thing I'd build a festival around.

So, if you like six-legged flying pests crawling across your counter and buzzing through your house when you have guests over, celebrate it by coming to Boxelder Bug Days in Minneota, MN.

I'm ready to move to South Dakota now.

same bitch time, same bitch channel...
__________
*Yes, there is supposed to be a space between "box" and "elder."

September 05, 2005

Um. Okay...

The strangest subject line I have seen in a spam to date:

New GIRLS of BIG SAUSAGE PIZZA

I don't have even the first guess what in the hell this means; and it had an attachment on it, so I didn't open it to find out. It involves girls and pizza, though, so I'm envisioning guys getting all excited and clicking on it.

All it does is make me hungry.

And my keyboard died, one day before my new computer is to arrive. Actually, I think I killed it. I'm not one to jump to conclusions, but it DID happen right after part 2 of a three-part binding ritual I'm doing which is probably the strongest binding I've ever done. There was a lot of nasty energy coming down the pipe. I wouldn't be surprised if it gave it that extra little jolt it took to fry the keyboard this time when I smacked it for being recalcitrant [as I often do--with, I might add, no ill effect].

So if you're banishing or binding, especially if it involves a relative or somebody else you're close to, make sure you purify your space regularly for a while afterwards, because it can get kinda dirty. I'm gonna have to cleanse my altar and everything after this. I'm not even going to dump my chalice water in the plants like I usually do because I'm scared it'll kill them. It's going straight down the potty, not unlike Bush's approval rating.

Compound subjects with "and"

[I'm sick of coming up with entry titles again. Can you tell?]

The phone company through which I get my dialup service has merged its dialup service with a couple other companies. They have sworn on a stack that it won't affect anybody's service, but for some mysterious reason, ever since the merger, my dialup is three times as slow as it was before. What this means to you, reader, is that hunting for links for my vast readership of four is a total pain in the fucking ass when I can only follow one link at a time without overloading my gerbil-urethra bandwidth to the point where everything times out and Firefox whimpers that it can't find the servers. ["I couldn't find google.com. I couldn't find yahoo.com. Oh well, I guess they don't exist!"]

In fact, as I'm typing this, there are four buttons to the left here that never loaded because I wanted the page to stop loading before I got old and died.

No, I'm not asking for money for a DSL upgrade. I'm just saying, I'm not going to be doing a lot of the random-link thing because it's a royal pain in the minge and nobody seems to care one way or the other anyway. I know I don't.

So go here and here if you want. If not, do like I did: get a dictionary, flip to a random page, find a random word, Google it, and follow whatever search results look interesting. Sounds fun and easy, doesn't it? It should be. It used to be, up til a couple months ago. Now it's like trying to empty an engorged bladder past a prostate the size of a basketball--slow, painful and thoroughly unpleasant.

***

I have a rough draft of a paper and a finished proposal due by the end of this week.

Yes, the hurricane sucks. Yes, Bush sucks. Yes, everybody dropped the ball. Everybody else in the fucking galaxy has written about it already, so I'm not going to flap my gums about it too. I dropped $10 in the hurricane relief drop box at Mallwart the other day, and if more cash makes itself available, I'll do it again. This assumes I can afford the gas to go anywhere. I had been getting the premium because my car runs better on it, but now I'm going to have to buy the medium-grade horseshit that everybody else buys.

And my professor is not going to give me an extension just because a hurricane happened 1300 miles away, and Bush cut levee funding and sat around with his thumb up his ass for four years instead of preparing for one of the three disasters most likely to occur acording to FEMA, and it's pissing me off. [The other two were a terrorist attack on NYC and a major earthquake in Frisco. Not-so-random link here, thanks to D.C. Simpson of IDT.] It's also not going to get the apartment clean. Simpson, who follows the news more devotedly than I do, says it very eloquently in the "I Think This" section of IDT.

True to my mile-wide selfish streak, the main thing I'm worried about right now is the "graduation achievement portfolio" that we're supposed to put together by the time we graduate. It's supposed to contain a few of the college assignments we're most proud of, and ostensibly we're supposed to present this to prospective employers and it's supposed to impress them or something.

First of all, the idea that somebody in an interview is going to be impressed by samples of my schoolwork makes me giggle. Secondly, one of the guidelines is that the works we present have to be ones that we're proud of. Excuse me? You're supposed to be proud of your schoolwork? What fucking grade am I in again? I'm sorry, but that's like being proud of doing the dishes. What's to be proud of? They tell you to do it and you do it. If you volunteered for community service or built your own house or did ANYTHING on your own initiative, that's something to be proud of. Doing what you were told is not something to be proud of unless you really derive that much pleasure from being told what to do.

I'm just saying. It's sorta retarded. I can't wait for commencement; they'll probably hand out medals for being able to feed and dress yourself. I'll be crushed if I don't get mine.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go write a seven-page research paper so I can give a copy to my mom to put on her fridge.